Hacker News Reader

Comment by rafram | Hacker News Reader

It filter to people/organizations who have a hand-wavey relationship with $500.

I use a small percentage of my Pro token quota to find better deals on hotels, rental cars, discount codes for large purchases, etc. Have it automatically scanning credit card points promos and flight deals via various APIs too. Easily pays for itself in that regard. Over $1k, I'm not sure it would break even anymore.

Fuck, that's smart. Thank you for the idea.

Well, that was fun while it lasted:)

What’s a typical concrete outcome from this workflow? Is it saving you time, or money? Because if you buy the $2500 flight when a $2000 flight is available and you just have to scroll down the page, that’s not $500 that you’ve saved…

Reminds of the “girl math” meme that’s trending amongst millennials and younger: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/boy-math-girl-math

For example, I needed two rental cars that could each carry seven people for a trip to Maine. There's so many different combinations of ways to search for this that it would take forever to do manually. I have membership in Avis, Hertz, Costco + Chase Reserve Travel, etc. Codex with direct browser usage bypasses most of the web fetch restrictions you get when trying to use the ChatGPT web UI on Pro mode.

I had Codex queue any CAPTCHAs for me to solve. Also set up one sub-agent to search Reddit for other people's clever approaches to getting good rental car deals. Ultimately, it found a third party reseller for Avis that had a price of $600 using a discount code for both cars vs $1,100 cheapest from Avis directly. I would not have discovered that on my own, at least not without like a week's worth of manual searching. So right there that was a $1,000 saving for both cars in exchange for 20 minutes of writing a decent Codex prompt.

Do you know about AutoSlash?

I had Codex queue any CAPTCHAs for me to solve

Interesting, you don't find that the model is perfectly capable of solving those on its own?

Or does it just refuse to try?

What APIs do you use for this?

For flights, SerpApi (to get Google Flights data) in combination with seats.aero pro. I use data from those services with a MILP library where I provide various travel and cost constraints. Runs periodically and notifies me of any good deals. I don't know if my setup actually does much more than the more expensive paid services already out there, but I can at least customize it a lot more to my liking to avoid a lot of manual search effort.

If it’s small percentage then you could spend just that few dollars in API costs or lower subscription and the rest is profit. So you're not saving anything, just reclassifying that opportunity cost to feel better about your subscription’s value. I know it's pedantic but it's useful to be aware of opportunity cost trying to trick us.

Can even have it look for (and enter) sweepstakes within your interests, autonomously, if you give it access to its own email that you don't mind getting blasted with spam.

That's actually intriguing.

I have a Grok Bot that just looks for glitched pricing and crazy deals on a list of items I need and it reports in a couple of times a day.

How else can we get these things to make us/save us money?

all of this exists for cheap without AI

I try to do the same thing, but I just don't see these very large savings. I can't even really justify the $200 or $100 tier off of it. I usually can match it immediately or beat it with just some brief Googling. I simply don't think the price arbitrage just really exists in any reliable way, month to month. Its more of a bonus if it happens to work out.

My tests in the past month, basically $0 saved over my findings: - Two one-way flights - New OLED 55"- 65" TV - Mini PC for CI/CD runner, with very specific specs - Expensive, specialized medical device - Variety of car parts

I think one problem is that I simply already know the places to check for this stuff. The more esoteric places (ebay/fb marketplace/etc) agents seem to just be awful at parsing what is real, what is a scam, what is a good deal, etc, and that is where the big deals are for stuff.

Does ChatGPT have the same large enterprise restrictions as Claude, where teams above a certain size are required to use API billing?

That would limit the $500 plan to smaller businesses.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com